LulzSec E-mail Hack Proves We’re Lousy at Picking Passwords

Whether you think LulzSec is doing us a favor for exposing our security weaknesses surgery opine the hacker group has bygone too far, a very old lesson can comprise scholarly here: we demand to make over stronger passwords. New analysis of the 62,000 logins LulzSec made publicly available reveals, yet again, our seriously weak password habits.

This certainly isn't the first time we've seen how piteous some of our passwords are. Last January, one study revealed the most typical passwords in use by the 32 million accounts hacked on RockYou.com were "123456" and "password". In December, analysis of 188,279 passwords stolen from Gawker showed those two passwords again as the most unremarkably misused.

The acme passwords from the LulzSec rubbish dump, according to an analysis by coder Aviv Ben-Yosef? You guessed it: "123456", followed by "123456789" and in third place, "password".

Analysis by Aviv Ben-Yosef, The Code Dump (click to enlarge)

Opposite top passwords from the LulzSec sample contained common words like-minded "romance" and whodunit," mayhap revealing besides some users' desire for thing whole login affair to be less quotidian. Other users went the simple route: almost 20 percent of the passwords were each numbers.

Despite password best practices-using a ruffle of uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters-only 2 percent of the LulzSec passwords contained capital letters and a specified 0.85 percent contained special characters.

Ludicrous, right? If you're reading this, you probably assume't need to embody reminded of how imperative it is to create strong passwords and non use the same login everywhere. You probably doh, yet, acknowledge someone (or many people) who could benefit from you forwarding them some good old password advice, like exploitation password managers to chassis better passwords (without expiration disturbed) and how adding "789" at the close of "123456" does not make a password Sir Thomas More guaranteed.

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